This well made Theosophical work is, I think, my favorite by Besant thus far. It avoids some of the more strange material in that path associated with ethnic issues and focuses almost entirely on religious history- namely that associated with Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity, proclaiming that those are akin to four epochs of spiritual development, with...
This extremely interesting work is sadly little-known despite its scope; several thousand years of human history and a dozen or so cultures, with all funerary rites they're associated with- from the memento mori and then-modern practices back through embalming, interring, or burning corpses.
The greatest part of this work is its general mention of the slow (or occasionally...